


The Lesson

by Deannie



Category: The Magnificent Seven (TV)
Genre: Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-26
Updated: 2013-05-26
Packaged: 2017-12-13 01:37:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/818439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deannie/pseuds/Deannie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was a lesson you never wanted a friend to learn... (Missing scene for the episode Achilles)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Lesson

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first fic I have written in nearly six years. Thanks to Celli for the beta and the overall being-awesomeness, and thanks to Mag 7, for rekindling the fannish love all out of the blue!

Ezra was transfixed by the curled up body shivering so hard in such a tiny space. He wondered that JD didn’t literally come apart at the seams. He flashed on the memory of the weight of a corpse on his own body and failed to force himself to look away.

“JD, what’s the matter with you, coming out here by yourself!?” Chris screamed, though Ezra was likely not the only one to hear more concern than anger in the bellow. “You could’ve got—“ 

Ezra saw the exact moment Chris knew that yelling wouldn’t help. 

And he remembered, far too vividly, that same mixture of pity and disgust and outright fear for a young man’s sanity on his captain’s face, fifteen years ago.

Buck placed his rifle carefully on the ground and inched up to the young man who, in terror, had wedged himself under the coffin of the woman he’d killed. Ezra finally turned his back on the scene and locked eyes with Josiah, who seemed to read the Southerner’s silent plea. _Don’t let him see you seeing him like this._

Josiah put a heavy hand on Nathan’s shoulder and steered his friend around to the other end of the coffin, though Ezra knew their healer was worried more about some possible unseen physical wound than a wound of the soul. Clearly, Josiah knew well that the latter was nearly always more painful than the former.

“Come on, now, JD,” Buck cajoled softly. “I just need to make sure you’re okay, now, all right?”

Ezra saw Chris pull himself away from his own obviously terrified ponderings and look up to find all of the rest of his men standing out of JD’s sight on the other side of the coffin. Silent. Ready.

“Hitch up the wagon,” he muttered, directing the order at no one. “We’ll take Hector, too.” He gave JD one more worried, sorrowful look, his gaze drifting up to the coffin that had sheltered him. “Let’s get them home.”

 

By the time both coffins had been settled in the back of the wagon, a measure of sanity had returned to JD’s exhausted eyes, just as Ezra had known it would. This kind of shock was fleeting, after all. Killing really did get easier with repeated doings.

“I can do it,” JD ground out, as Buck made to mount the buckboard in front of the coffins, meaning to ride the somber load home with his young friend. Ezra watched Chris give a dismal smile of approval as Buck backed off without prompting, letting JD carry the load he’d never be able to put down.

It was a load that never got any lighter. Ezra knew he’d dream tonight of a Union soldier, no older than JD but older than he himself had been when he’d killed the boy. A boy, truly, with innocent gray eyes that pleaded for life even as he bled his all and breathed his last on the Virginia soil at the end of Ezra’s bayonet. JD had killed before, but for Ezra, that first time had been his first innocent. 

So far, through obsessive practice of both accuracy and patience, it had been his last. He refused to count those the canons had dispatched. Those iron monsters were cruel and indiscriminate--and his own guilt would surely overwhelm him if he counted those costs. The truth remained though, that you never forgot the taste of self-abhorrence you had when you first realized that you could kill someone who had no call to die. It was a lesson you never wanted a friend to learn.

And the gambler knew, looking around at the shadowed eyes of his compatriots, that his would not be the only nightmares tonight. 

It was, most assuredly, a Hell of a world they found themselves in. 

“Come on, JD,” Buck murmured, riding close beside the wagon, pain-filled eyes on its driver, as JD coaxed the horses into movement. “Let’s go home.”

Yes, a Hell of a world. But at least, Ezra thought with a snort for his own sentimentality, they appeared to all be in it together.

* * * * * * *  
The End


End file.
